Welcome György Kovács

This guest post is written by György Kovács, one of our Google Summer of Code students for 2012.

I have graduated in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary. Now, I am a BSc. student in Physics and PhD student in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Graphics and Image Processing of the same university. My main research fields are statistical medical image analysis and pattern recognition. Besides, I have definite interest for interdisciplinary topics related to computer science, math or physics.

Nowadays, climate change is one of the most intensively researched topics of science, several research groups are analyzing and trying to understand the phenomenon with the aid of computers, well-developed mathematical models and processing plenty of data. One aim of the Climate Code Foundation is to make the already developed and published approaches and algorithms available to the open source community and my contribution to these efforts is going to be the reimplementation of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) software, using open source tools.

Due to the excellent job of researchers of the BEST project, a larger temperature dataset has been collected than ever before, and new homogenization and averaging models have been developed. The software was written in MatLab using cluster-based parallelization to process the data of more than 40,000 weather stations. The scientific papers, software and data are freely available on the website of the project.

My aim is to create a clear reimplementation of the BEST-software in C. First, a serial version, providing the same functionality as the BEST-software, is going to be built. Then, a parallelization framework will be developed using OpenMPI to provide faster processing. Hopefully, by the end of summer, one of the state-of-the-art climate analysis software becomes available as a C package, that is beneficial for both the open source and open science communities. During the summer, my progress can be followed in my project blog.